Commercial Real Estate Pro Network

Commercial Real Estate Professionals who work with Investors, Buyers and Sellers of Commercial Real Estate. We discuss todays opportunities, problems & solutions in Commercial Real Estate.

BIGGEST RISK with Travis Watts 2025 11/18/2025

Affordable Housing Public-Private Partnerships with Danielle Ash - CRE PN #529 11/13/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Danielle Ash 11/11/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Danielle Ash J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you. Danielle Ash, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Danielle Ash Well, I'm going to give a self serving answer, and then I'm going to give more of an investor based type answer. So the self serving answer, I think, is, you know, people come to me from all different sectors of real estate and at all different parts of their career, from early stage developers, sponsors to, you know, super high net worth sovereign wealth funds, who've been investing for 50 plus years. And I do think one of the biggest mistakes or risks that people face is not having good counsel involved in their transactions, having transactional counsel who has the combination of wanting to explain the risk to you and able to do it in a way that you understand, and also not getting in the way of the transaction Just to look smart or kind of win the point. You know, there's a balance of trying to identify risk and be creative about how do we structure around that risk? How do we get you the protections you need? How do we think about all the different ways that bad things could happen and you need to address? And how do you help your investors? Protect your investors in the long run through those but at the same time, what good is it if you can't close the deal right and knowing the difference between what risk is worth cutting the deal over and what risk is something that you can find a mitigation for? So that's on the self serving side, because you know, all the time I see attorneys who aren't really doing that extra work, or where clients come to me and they they've done a deal, and they didn't see this issue before, and now they're facing it, and they need real explanation as to, like, why we have to think about it on the investor side, I will say that, you know, just thinking about policy for a second. Now, there's been a lot of change in policy at the federal level, at state levels, everywhere right now, it's a bit of a crazy time for trying to follow what's happening. And while there has been a lot of great gains for, you know, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit for changes in that policy, I do think that, and I'm borrowing this from one of my clients, Sharif Mitchell, at Northern Liberties, that the risk of a lot of those policies is actually on the populations being served by affordable housing. And we don't always think about those sort of tertiary elements. We don't always think about the fact that, you know, they still have to put food on the table, that they have to figure out how they're going to get you know their children to school, you know that they have to commute. All those costs come into play, and what we've seen over the last few years with a lot of affordable housing, especially coming out of covid, is you have a lot of high arrears issues coming up, because tenants have to choose, do I pay my rent, or do I feed my kids? And when you have policies that make those potential decisions harder, or where they're losing potential benefits, you know, in some states, it's very hard to get your tenants out for non payment, and so a lot of them are going to take the risk that, you know, maybe I'm just going to feed my kids instead. And so I do think that's something important to think about. That when you're putting together a capital stack, you're looking at the population, you're figuring out, how are you going to serve that population, how you're going to work with those people to ensure that they have the capacity, they have the other resources they need to stay in that housing is that really is going to impact the value of your asset in the long term as well? /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/38177050

Flexible Workspace Solves Human Interaction Need with Mark Goldfinger - CRE PN #528 11/06/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Mark Goldfinger 11/04/2025

Non-Performing Loan Real Estate Investment Litigation Strategy with Chris Zona - CRE PN #527 10/30/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Chris Zona 10/28/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Chris Zona J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you, Chris Zona, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Chris Zona Sure. So I think it really fits within what we're talking about. I think the biggest risk for investors that are in this this realm is that you need to be comfortable with taking over a potential non performing note, right? Like there is no way to avoid risk when you're making this sort of play. So what you need to do is kind of, you know, balance minimizing the risk through your diligence process, because you don't want to take on something that you're not ready to you don't want to overextend in taking it on, and then kind of balance that with the, you know, maximize your return on whatever risk, wherever in the risk matrix that you fall right, they always say higher risk, higher returns. Was very true. You know, if you're going to buy a very, very non performing loan, you're going to be, you know, probably up on the tier of of the extension of capital, and you need to mitigate whatever risk, make sure that you have a cap stack in place to do that you don't want to take on additional debt in order to kind of engage in that strategy, because now you're becoming another note holder as well as being the Enforcer. And then make sure that on the back end, that you're prepared for whatever the downside of your investment is, and that your investors, if you're running a management that you're openly communicating with them, timeline and the potential downfall, as you've said, there's the nice thing about this strategy is, if you're not a very, very specific strategy fund or investor, you can minimize the downside by how you enter and what your exit looks like. If you're flexible in what your exit looks like, then this could be a very attractive strategy, because you know, if you don't need to exit the property and return your to your investors capital within a short period of time, then maybe you can stay in that property longer, hopeful, hope that the note holder turns it around. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/38176865

Long Term Benefits of Commercial Real Estate with Travis King - CRE PN #526 10/23/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Travis King 10/21/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Travis King J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you. Travis King, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Travis King It's a great question. It's actually really hard to try to encapsulate it in one thing, so maybe I might give a multifaceted answer, if that's okay with you. One thing I would say that is paramount in real estate, and I alluded to it earlier, is the only real way I know to lose money in real estate is to lever inappropriately. So leverage at the end of the day, that's how you lose control of your properties, right? And that happens. So then I you peel that onion a little bit and say, Okay, well, how does that happen? Right? How do you run into problems there? And I think there's two main areas that I would focus on as kind of sub points. Number one is going to be making sure that you're checking your assumptions and making sure that they stand up in a lot of alternative scenarios you might not have considered, right? A perfect example was back in, remember, during the housing bubble of of 2008 when everything popped, they realized at one point that there was no way to even show you know, potential negative drop in housing values, right? That's a great example of just a a glaring error of saying, Well, you got to be able to test some of your assumptions. And I think you really need to beat them up and test them under old under ultimate scenarios that could happen. Black Swans do happen, right? And I think that sometimes it doesn't even need to be a black swan. And we've seen things where we've preached to folks over and over to say, in multifamily as an example, if you were to go through and change your rents just by 10 or 15% on a multifamily property. And then, you know, the cap rates move, you know, a little bit. You know, you have cap rates move 50 basis point because the markets in a little bit of turmoil, right? And your occupancy gets hit by five 10% just all these things are fairly small changes. It could be 15 to 20% of the value of the property. So if you're if you're buying something, you know, that's very highly leveraged, you could find yourself in a very difficult position very quickly. The second thing I would say is be careful who you're doing business with. A lot of times it really comes down to making sure you have the right partners. Some of the biggest problems I've seen happen are are doing business with the wrong people. And I think that that's where you run into problem, regardless of what your dollar of what your documents might say. If you're not dealing with trustworthy people that are putting integrity first and foremost, that's an easy way to get into trouble. So eyes wide open on who you work with. Do your do your background checks, talk to people, get references, referrals. Move slowly. I think you do those two things together and stay conservative in your capital structure. You avoid, you avoid a lot of pitfalls. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/38176835

Self Storage Development Process with Bill Kanatas and Ben Salzberg - CRE PN #525 10/16/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Bill Kanatas and Ben Salzberg 10/14/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Bill Kanatas and Ben Salzberg J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you Bill Kanatas and Ben Salzberg, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Bill Kanatas I look at two different risks, one as an investor slash investment, and one is a developer slash development. Um, so if we're talking about the development aspect first, because, as I mentioned earlier, Ben and I spend our money up front first, before we go to the investors looking for their money, we do a lot of work upfront to mitigate that risk, and in any development, nothing ever goes perfect, as much as we think it's going to be great. It's not going to rain tomorrow. We're going to have sunshine for three weeks, and the bulldozers will be out there, and all sudden, we get rain for three weeks, and the holes we just dug flood, right? So you gotta be able to have that in your underwriting. Right? So when I tell somebody it's going to be 10 to 12 months, you know, I underwrite it 14 months, in case we have an additional four months of interest reserve or operational losses. So we try to mitigate all that risk upfront. When you're looking as an investor, slash investment. Then, you know, the advice I always give to my own friends is look at the first let's start with the development team, right? Do they know how to develop you know, whatever it is, is it a Starbucks? Is it self storage? Is it car washes? Make sure you're right with the right development team, or make sure they have experience, obviously. Make sure that you believe in the area. You know. Is there a reason to put one in Bosie, Idaho, or is there one to put it one in Manhattan, you know? Is there a demand for self storage? And then who's operating it? Is it the Bill and Ben show? Or is it, you know, an operator who knows what they're doing? Is it the first time they're operating? Or do they have, you know, billions of dollars of annual revenue in this space? So I think there's various checklists to kind of mitigate that risk. And then at some point you gotta say, I'm all in and and dive in and know that if there is any problems, your partners will communicate that with you, right? Because it's very, very important to always have communication, you know, with your lender, with your investor, with your general contractor, with the village. You know, Benz, an elected official. And when you're working with the communities, you have to perform. You can't tell them one thing and do something else, right? So communication for me is always the best, Ben Salzberg And then I agree with you on that bill, you know, making sure the constituents in the area, which are mine and that they're they like what we're building and developing in the community, and to mitigate that risk of any type of Fallout, of people being frustrated, being built self storage in the neighborhood, um, you know, that's that, that risk. And of course, then there's, you know, you want to make sure that the job is insured in case somebody gets hurt, you know. And that goes with you Darrin, you know, you have to, you know, PNC, make sure that it's everybody's covered. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/38176805

Commercial Real Estate Technology Infusion with Philippe Lanier - CRE PN #524 10/09/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Philippe Lanier 10/07/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Philippe Lanier J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you, Philippe Lanier, what is the biggest risk? Philippe Lanier Just to answer, because you gave me a little bit of a chain, one of the first important steps sitting in my feet. And to simplify for your audience, if you are an owner, you are an owner of real estate, is to recognize that the world changed and you lost a lot of money, and not bury your head in the sand. The value was fundamentally changed, and it's not coming back. And once you can emotionally get over that, you know, then you're then you're thinking about how to apply what I know and what I have left to rebuild it and to create something great. And that's where we are right now. I think the worst is in theory over and then, how do we reassess where we are as owners, what we've had lost, and how do we build something new? The you know, the biggest risk is if you haven't absorbed that, but you think that help is around the corner, if you run out of time, then you're out of the game. If the banks foreclose, then you've lost all sweat equity. It's very difficult to start again. So to make sure, you put yourself in a position where you're not hoping for a situation to change. Imagine that interest rates away may maintain high for a while. Imagine that this stuff is not going to get easier for longer. Make sure that you're you're running a company that doesn't, you know, lose money every month in salaries. That might mean you have to let some people go that that's just where we. Are. And then, then you solve for the risk of of things not getting better. And then, and then, yeah, then you, you just work hard and build the pain is real, but I love the the advice to, you know, say, Just admit it, and, you know, go forward from there, as opposed to keep looking for the the silver bullet, or, you know, something that's going to come and save the day, because that, that is, that's, that's really wise. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/38139750

ADA Lawsuits and Commercial Real Estate with Josh Bauchner - CRE PN #523 10/02/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Josh Bauchner 09/30/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Josh Bauchner J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you. Josh Bauchner, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Josh Bauchner Well, the biggest risk here is getting sued by one of these serial plaintiffs, with one of these attorneys who's just in it for for the fees. To answer your question, I think ADA compliance planning, bringing in one of these testers, like we discussed, to assess the premises and make any determinations as to what's not compliant, then do an assessment as to what the cost would be to potentially bring it into compliance. Is it something that you could readily do, putting up the handlebars in the bathroom stall, for example, perhaps changing the front entrance door to provide handicap accessibility, or is it cost prohibitive? If the bathroom is downstairs and you can install an elevator, there's really no way around that to gain access. And then the challenge becomes with respect to shifting that burden, the landlords are doing that right. So in most lease agreements, most commercial lease agreements, the landlords are including an indemnification obligation where they're shifting the burden onto the tenant to both ensure compliance, remediate the premises in the absence of compliance, and if sued, pay for the landlord's fees and costs. It challenges again, the tenant doesn't necessarily recognize that obligation in Louise when they're signing on, and they certainly don't recognize what the costs that they're at risk of incurring are going to be if they are sued. And so unless they're a really big business, you know, $100,000 hit to your bottom line could put you out of business, and then again, it becomes the domino effect. Great. So now they are out of business. They've shut down. They've got six more years on their lease term. They vacated the premises. Now the landlord suing the tenant because they've reached the lease the landlord has to find the new tenant to mitigate it just creates a whole host of unintended consequences, all because, again, these serial filers think they're doing right, /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/38139715

The ROI of Art in Commercial Real Estate with Jennifer Brener Seay - CRE PN #522 09/25/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Jennifer Brener Seay 09/23/2025

Industrial Outdoor Storage Investment Strategy with Blake Rodgers - CRE PN #521 09/18/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Blake Rogers 09/16/2025

Commercial Real Estate Financing Options with George Otel - CRE PN #520 09/11/2025

BIGGEST RISK with George Otel 09/09/2025

BIGGEST RISK with George Otel J Darrin Gross If you're willing, I'd like to ask you, George Otel, what is the BIGGEST RISK? George Otel The biggest risk when it comes to funding, is not looking for funding early enough, because the biggest risk is when people call me that they need funding yesterday. So it's I tell people you always have to look for funding, even if you don't need it, because when you need it, you may not find it where you may be. Tweaks. Expensive because of your situation. Let's say you got to look for funding when you're doing good, when you're doing great, because the lenders see less risk in you, because when, when you desperate, you you have a need your fire, fire you're burning, then that's a risk. So for the risk, they want to get more premium. So that's, that's how it works. The biggest risk is like, if, if you always got to look for funding, because it's you got to have funding options lined up, because you always growing. You're looking for equipment, you're looking for working capital, even lines of credit. We have lines of credit. So I tell people you rather have those lines of credit and not use it, then you need it and you don't have it, because that's that's another thing. So for example, there's a lot of loans do right right now for the there's a lot of balloons, though, and banks will like to when you approach them, like five, six months in advance to your balloon. You don't want to wait two months because it's too late. It's going to take two, three months to go to the process. So once the balloon is done, it's you're going to be in default. So it's because you got to refinance before that. So the biggest risk is not looking for funding early enough. And again, in good times, the banks, local banks, are really good. I love my local banks, but we are in uncertain times, a lot of volatility, and they don't like risk, so they avoid risk. Also private money lenders, they more risk. They have more appetite for the risk. And there is a small premium, and obviously it's worth it, because you'd rather pay a small premium and get your funding lined up, then have no funding option and be in a unpleasant situation. So also working with a funding finance broker like our company, because we have multiple options lined up. So basically, when the clients come to us in 1015, minutes conversation, initial conversation, we present them multiple funding option. We ask them about how they position their assets, the cash flow, how everything works. Then we present the Multiple option, because when you go to the bank, to to the local bank, they give you one option, and he said yes or no, but we have different options lined up. So if this one doesn't work, we're moving to the next and so on, until you get the funding and you getting the to the results you you need. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/37854570

Virtual Assistants for Real Estate Focused Businesses with Pete Neubig - CRE PN #519 09/04/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Pete Neubig 09/02/2025

Interior Design Space Planning for Multifamily Housing with Marcy Sagel - CRE PN #518 08/28/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Marcy Sagel 08/26/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Marcy Sagel J Darrin Gross I'd like to ask you, Marcy Sagel, what is the BIGGEST RISK? Marcy Sagel I'm going to answer that in a few parts, because there's different aspects of the job that can be different risks. So when we pick materials for a project, we have to make sure we're working with tried and true materials, okay, materials that are not going to fail on a job, for instance, in the units, if we select a, you know, vinyl plank flooring, we want to make sure it's going to last. So we only work with manufacturers that we know are going to give us a solid product, not we're not trying to test some new product on different people. We really want to make sure that those stand the test of time from a risk standpoint. So that's probably one of the biggest things. The second thing is the furniture. We also specify all of the furniture, and are an installation. So we put all of the furniture into warehouses, and we have to make sure that the warehouses are bonded and insured and going to be doing replacement if there's any problems. And we use it. We use warehousing all over the country, and so we do a lot of due diligence to make sure that risk is minimal, and we work with a lot of the same vendors so that we make sure that we have very, very, very solid in warehousing around the country. Really, really important to our job. There's so many aspects of that the material goods that we order are sent directly to those warehouses. They have them come in on camera. They're signed for. If there's any look or damage to any box or item or palette, they immediately are under record with us to open it up, inspect it and give us a photo and report immediately, within 24 hours, so that we can report it to the manufacturer, and we want to make sure that our, you know, installations go as smoothly as possible. We have a really good track record with that, and the reason we do is because we use really good receivers. They receive it, they're knowledgeable. They take a picture of everything coming in, it's got an item number, it's got a quantity number, and then we have it on record that we can then log into their software and see all of those items online and match it up to our spreadsheets. It's very, very, very organized, and we like it that way, so we only work with groups that are very organized and can follow sort of the regiment that we're used to, so that we can minimize any of the risk. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/37854275

Workforce Housing Community Development with Lissette Calderon - CRE PN #517 08/21/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Lissette Calderon 08/19/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Lissette Calderon J Darrin Gross If you're willing, I'd like to ask you. Lissette Calderon, What is the BIGGEST RISK? Lissette Calderon Well, I think in today's world, probably the biggest risk you have is uncertainty. And how do you underwrite uncertainty? You know what happens next? How do you underwrite whether it's Harris insurance numbers, construction costs, what does that uncertainly look like, and what, how do you underwrite that? So, you know, how do we do it? You know, we really can't avoid it because, you know, we're developers. So of course, our job is, you know, we really think about a how do we minimize it? So we make sure that, you know, every project, you know, is built, oftentimes, by the same team, the same architect, the same project, and, you know, same contractor, and so forth. And then, you know, we enter into a guaranteed maximum price contract, so ahead of time, we already know what that number is going to look like. Of course, we're building contingencies. So we minimize those uncertainties, so that that's, that's always the hard part, and then in terms of, you know, transferring the risk, and then the insurance, and that's probably how you get to a little bit of the avoiding the risk. You know, especially in South Florida, one of the things that people always talk about is kind of like sea level rise, flood level and how does climate play into what we're doing? Well, I can't move our projects out of South Florida because they're in South Florida, you know, the, you know, number of our projects. So in terms of transferring the risk, you know, we think about Master policies. Our projects are on master policies. So again, we're looking at the risk, kind of throughout the entire portfolio, not just on one independent portfolio and that that has been, you know, very effective for us in terms of mitigating our insurance expenses. Because really, the two biggest uncontrollables that we have as operators are real estate taxes and insurance. So real estate taxes, we've really been able to address that in Florida through, you know, kind of this statutory. Uh, you know, or an instance now that live local, and, you know, we're really able to address that and work with that. And then, from an insurance standpoint, it's always, you know, the next big challenge. And the way insurance numbers, you know, have gone up historically, and we've been able to mitigate that through the master policy and, you know, and how do we avoid, to the extent possible, avoiding is we build really well, you know. So we've got the flood panels, and we build that the right elevations, and we put in, you know, kind of the right, you know, glazing and glass and everything that Mills meets or exceeds the South Florida building codes. And then, you know, we try to go into neighborhoods that we know make sense from a you know, kind of climate standpoint. So Isla pad is up on a ridge. And so we really take into account a lot of these things, and we think about it. And, you know, it's always very exciting to us, you know, after, you know, a big storm, you know, where you'll see kind of flooding on the streets, and some of these pictures that go nationally, our areas, you know, are immediately dry right after the storm, so it's, you know, and I guess that's how we probably avoid it. We build in great locations, and we build a great product, you know, how do we minimize it? We get into, like, you know, guaranteed maximum price, and really kind of understand what the uncertainty and really try to mitigate that uncertainty. And then, terms of transferring, it's, you know, we look at master policies and how we put those in place. /episode/index/show/commercialrealestatepronetwork/id/37746850

Commercial Real Estate Career Success Skills with Allen Buchanan - CRE PN #516 08/14/2025

BIGGEST RISK with Allen Buchanan 08/12/2025

Virtual Assistants Propel Real Estate Professionals Success with Bob Lachance - CRE PN #515 08/07/2025

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